How is Priority calculated?

The Priority of a Check is calculated on a scale between two values:

• A custom range Silktide defines for the specific Check
• The Progress for that check, inverted

If the Check is barely violated (e.g. a single spelling issue) it has a Priority at the low end of that scale. If the Check violates every single page, it appears at the high end of the scale. Some Checks are always important and other Checks are much less important unless they appear very often.

For example, spelling has a defined Priority range of 70 – 90. What this means is that the lowest priority that spelling can have is 70 (if there was one single spelling issue on a website), and the highest is 90 (if there were dozens of spelling errors on every page).

We use the Progress for the check to move between those ranges. If you are halfway through fixing your spelling issues you’d end up at 50% between 70 and 90, with a priority of 80.

Rationale

This is designed to reflect human intuitions:

• Some problems are always more important than others
• If a problem appears a lot (low Progress) then it’s higher priority
• If a problem appears rarely (high Progress) then it’s lower priority

This system gives us a lot of flexibility. We sometimes set ranges like “85 to 90”, e.g. if this problem occurs at any point it’s always super important. Or they can be “10 to 70”, e.g. this problem isn’t important if it occurs rarely, but is way more important if it occurs a lot.

If you add your own custom Policies, you can configure them to score in the same way.